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By Root 941 0

he had missed another 1964 watershed in the civil rights movement, the Democratic convention in Atlantic City. The convention belonged to Johnson, heir to the Kennedy administration. Johnson’s running mate, Hubert Humphrey, his protégé Walter Mondale, and other leaders of the liberal establishment, fearing they would lose the South to Goldwater, refused to seat the delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Party. This split the movement in two, largely on generational lines. The older civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King were used to the idea that the Democratic Party was not a dependable friend and required work. But SNCC lost faith in working with anyone from the white establishment. Bob Moses was angry. Young leaders such as Stokely Carmichael had no more patience. They began talking about Black Power, about black people going their separate way.

Only a few weeks before the Democratic convention, it was alleged that North Vietnamese gun boats had fired on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin. Johnson retaliated by attacking North Vietnam and got Congress to pass the Tonkin Gulf Resolution, which empowered the president to take “any means necessary” to protect South Vietnam. There has been much evidence, including a cable from one of the destroyers, that the attack may never have taken place. In 1968 the Senate held hearings on the subject but never resolved it conclusively. The suspicion has endured that the Tonkin incident, whether it occurred or not, was seized by Johnson as a pretext to pursue the war. Tom Hayden said, “When the Democratic Party was agreeing to the Tonkin Gulf Resolution at the same time they were refusing to seat the Mississippi Freedom Party, that was a turning point for me.”

The following year Stokely Carmichael went to Mississippi intending to form a local black political party in one of the counties there. He chose Lowndes County because it was 80 percent black. The all-white Mississippi State Democratic Party had a white rooster for a symbol. Searching for a predator that would devour a rooster, Carmichael called his party the Black Panthers. More than a year later two Californians, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, talked to Carmichael about starting their own California party for which they borrowed the name Black Panther. Not seating the Mississippi Freedom Party at the 1964 convention had radicalized the civil rights movement and profoundly changed the history of the 1960s in America.

One year after the Freedom Summer, the southern civil rights struggle was no longer center stage. Black Power was shifting attention to northern cities. Stokely Carmichael, Bob Moses, and all the diverse elements of the civil rights movement could agree on the importance of stopping the war and on little else.

Hoffman appeared not to have noticed this shift. In the spring of 1965, he opened the Snick Shop in his native Worcester, selling crafts made by poor blacks in the South while his fellow SNCC workers, H. Rap Brown, Stokely Carmichel, Julius Lester, and others were selling books and pamphlets on Black Power. Stokely Carmichael admired him for his physical courage. It was somewhat more than physical courage—an irresistible pull toward the vortex. When demonstrators were attacked, he stepped to the front and did everything he could to be the most visible. But when SDS organized its first antiwar rally in Washington, Hoffman did not even go. His most publicized comment about opposing the war at the time was that everyone should protest by going to Jones Beach on Long Island on a summer day wearing only bathing suits.

In 1968 Julius Lester published his seminal work, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power’s Gon’ Get Your Mama! Lester wrote about how it had been fine for SNCC to have “white and black together” in the words of the Pete Seeger anthem, when they were fighting southern racism, but once they went north it became clear that white people, not southerners, were the problem. “The mask,” he said, “began to slip from the North’s face.” He noted the media value of Black Power—it was provocative.

The cry